Featured Alumni

Davis L. Butler (M.A. UNO History 2000)

Profession: Defense Attaché and Principal Military Advisor to the U.S. ambassador, stationed in Gaborone, Botswana

Lieutenant Colonel Butler is sporting a distinguished career in the U.S. Army and studied at UNO from 1997 until 2000, completing a graduate degree in history. He is a Sub-Saharan Africa specialist and currently serves as the defense attaché and principal military advisor to the U.S. ambassador, stationed in Gaborone, Botswana. He previously served in the same capacity in Monrovia, Liberia (2004/5), and Dakar, Senegal (2000/1). He perfected his French and Portuguese at the Defense Language and Foreign Language Center in Monterey, California, preparing him for his work in West Africa. He also holds an M.A. in International Relations from Boston University, where he wrote a thesis on “U.S. Foreign Policy towards Angola, 1969-1989.”

“Lee” Butler came into the UNO History graduate program as a “mid-career” U.S. Army officer stationed with the 141 st Artillery Regiment of the U.S. National Guard in Jackson Barracks, New Orleans. I remember him well in class discussions as a student absorbing class materials easily, questioning the “naïve” views of civilians on the U.S. Cold War presence in the world, and adding his knowledge as an active Army officer to Cold War issues. He added enormously to the UNO graduate program. In fact, the students and instructors in the seminar classes learned as much from him as he learned from his professors. His military career still featured “Cold War” postings. He had served in both Korea and Germany in the early 1990s and fought in an artillery unit in the invasion of Iraq in the First Gulf War in 1991. He abstracted his experience as an artillery officer in battle and wrote an analysis and critique of artillery doctrine in the U.S. Army for his Master’s thesis at UNO: “Cold War Artillery Doctrine and Equipment: The Development of Counterfire and Its Use in the Persian Gulf War, 1972-1991.”

Butler’s undergraduate degree is from Virginia Tech. He began his career as an Army field artillery officer at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. After his overseas postings in Germany and Korea, he continued and refined his training as an artillery and intelligence specialist in Fort Hood, Texas. In the diction of Robert D. Kaplan’s latest book, Butler is an archetypical “imperial grunt” working on the periphery of the U.S. “global empire.”

Recommended and Written by Günter Bischof

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